No Hardware Anti-Aliasing under DirectX 11?

[Hali]

I’m sure I’m not the only person who was expecting this change to come about, only to feel rather bit disappointed that the time hadn’t been taken in order to make the adjustments for this. It would require a bit of effort in order to apply, but the trade off is an extremely huge difference.

The performance difference being a concern for some, FXAA is still a viable option to have this wouldn't go away. However the option to choose between software AA and hardware AA should be added in the future, as in this day and age the performance difference isn't drastic enough to consider it a dead avenue.

Hopefully a community rep could take the time to read through this and appropriately forward this information to the development team, that there's still a want for hardware anti-aliasing, if it could be added to the schedule. (As they did say they wanted to add more DX11 features in the future).

“What is Anti-Aliasing?”

Anti-Aliasing is an industry standard for reducing the inherent ‘stair-case’ effect that all 3D based games suffer from. The larger the distance, the more ‘pixelated’ things appear.
3D objects are made up of vector based polygons, because the computer is trying to render the vectors as accurately as possible to suit a pixel-based monitor, it creates this stair-case effect as a result, leading to the requirement to smooth it out afterwards.
This problem solver comes in various forms, some require more effort to implement as well as requiring more processing power in order to function.
But the trade-off is worth it. Software AA does not hold a candle to Hardware AA.

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“I don’t understand this, summarise it for me please?”

Essentially, every frame the game renders have ‘layers’, due to the way Deferred Rendering rendered lighting, shading and geometry in the scene, the hardware antialiasing would be ‘defeated’, meaning no effect would take place, this issue under DirectX9 pretty much lead to the wide-spread use of FXAA as a replacement. DirectX 10 fixed this issue, however it requires a bit of adjustment on how the scene is rendered.

“Wait, so FXAA isn’t Hardware Anti-Aliasing?”

No. FXAA is ‘Software’ Anti-Aliasing, this is a quick ‘pass’ over the entre screen/game scene AFTER the frame has been rendered which simply blurs it in order to try and smooth the aliasing in the scene. It’s very light on performance and easily applied, so it’s a great choice.

“So, then why bother with Hardware AA?”

The major difference between software AA and hardware AA is how it handles the scene it’s applied to. There are varying types of Hardware AA but basically it’ll detect ONLY the aliasing in the scene, including transparent edges (Hair/Grass/Robes)
This is an example of Hardware AA (Bearing in mind SSAA is old and no-longer used, but it shows the difference quite strikingly);

“I’m still a little confused as to how this applied to FFXIV?”

Looking at the previous image I posted in the last section, notice the difference in the jagged vs. smooth edges? When you’re playing FFXIV you may notice even with FXAA enabled the edge of your character, your hair, the grass, certain objects nearby or in the distance suffer from this jagged edge look where this seem to flicker a bit.
Hardware Anti-Aliasing would almost completely defeat this issue. It’s extremely powerful and it drastically improves the overall appearance of the game. FFXIV 1.0 proved this, with AA turned off, the game almost looks like ARR, with Hardware AA turned on, it looks like a completely different game altogether.



As you can see, with FXAA turned on [right] and turned off [left], the difference is substantial, however there's still a lot of ailising left over. An image doesn't do it as much justice, but try it for yourself in-game, and you'll notice the aliasing is still quite aggressive even with FXAA turned on, especially with anything that moves, or appears in the distance.


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For a technical analysis on the possible process they could use, you can view it here;
http://docs.nvidia.com/gameworks/con...drendering.htm